Are the developers working on new sources of information for Auto-Tag in MM4? The information page re: this error seems to indicate that MM4 users should use existing addons and not expect Auto-Tag to be updated.

I work exclusively with video files and found that all MM4 metadata addons target music files, not video. The same is true in the software market at large - there are few good products that handle video metadata well. Because of this I've come to rely completely on MM4's Auto-Tag feature and hope that it is re-implemented soon.

algoritmo wrote:I'm using v4.1.19 and the AutoTag funtion doesn't work except for the japanese link (amazon.co.jp).
This happened suddenly, because it worked properly earlier.
Anyone has a solution/explanation?

Please pardon the possibly dumb question, but the explanation linked above doesn't say whether this is a permanent situation or only temporary. Can someone provide a little more detail about what changed to break Amazon tagging?

Personally, I'm really unhappy to lose Amazon tagging after relying on it (and MM!) for so many years. I've tried other approaches like the Discogs add-on, but none offer equivalent functionality to Amazon. They're a lot harder to use and don't provide anywhere near the flexibility of Amazon. The Discogs add-on frequently provides no results where Amazon does, and Discogs seems to provide metadata at the track level even when I'm trying to tag at the album level (ie, most of the time).

As suggested, I did try the Discogs auto-tag built into the MM 5 beta, but it's clearly not yet ready for prime time. Results still come from multiple albums, even with the 'album level' option selected - this screws up all the track numbers; titles are often incorrect; and lots of the metadata is missing (release year, etc.) You also can't yet select which fields to update - at this point it appears to be all-or-nothing. Not complaining; I'm sure this feature has a lot of work yet to be done.

Please tell us that the problem/disagreement with Amazon can be resolved soon so auto-tagging can start working again?!

Unfortunately, it appears that this is going to be a permanent situation. The issue has arisen because amazon changed its policies re. partners' use of their metadata APIs. They no longer permit 3rd party _applications_ to use these APIs, and only allow websites to do so. We're attempting to get special permission to continue as in the past, but I don't have high hopes that we'll be able to resolve this.

Regarding alternatives, in the short term the discogs addon for MediaMonkey 4 is probably the best one (it is _not_ the same as the functionality that we're building into MM5). At the same time, we're working hard to improve the auto-tag addon in MediaMonkey 5 and expect that by the time it's released, it'll be much improved over the 'old' amazon-based functionality. If you have specific feedback about albums that fail, or other issues that you'd like to see improved in it, please report back to the MediaMonkey 5 pre-release forum.

I realize that this isn't the answer you're looking for, and we apologize for the inconvenience.